Is the Financial Times in trouble?

The London-based financial newspaper now has a new top editior in Lionel Barber, but it faces increased competition from a variety of sources and slumping readership in its home market, according to an item posted on Media Life.

The piece states that Barber’s top job is “repairing the fortunes of the once most august and still very respected business daily from the ravages and aftermath of the dot.com bust and the paper’s declining position on its home turf. While the FT‘s fortunes are improving, it now faces competition from international papers, domestic papers and free sheets, as well as the internet, that did not exist a decade ago.”

Barber was well known here in the United States as the newspaper’s managing editor for America. But he inherits a newspaper that has seen its readership in Britain drop 36 percent in the six months ended September 2005 and 20 percent for the 12 months ended in September, as reported by the quarterly National Readership Survey.

This comes after dramatic declines in paid circulation in Britain over recent years, from 140,000 in 2001 to 94,000 last year. Worldwide, it has a circulation of 439,563.

The CEO of the Financial Times’ parent company, Marjorie Scardino, is also an American. She has said she would sell the paper over her dead body.

Read the entire piece here.